Sunday, October 26, 2014

31 Days of Horror: Return of the Living Dead III

Melinda Clarke plays Julie, who hates herself and what she has become in Return of the Living Dead III.

In addition to our
regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be
bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make
our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more
as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31
Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 26: Return of the Living Dead III (1993)

The Return of the
Living Dead series starts out as essentially fun horror-comedy in its first
two installments, but the third entry almost demands that you sit up and take
notice. I will say right off the bat: Things are going to get pretty dark in
this post. We are going to talk about depression, self-harm, and the Holocaust.
If you want no part of it, I understand. No hard feelings.

Zombie movies are at their best when they reflect something
back about our culture, be it consumerism, racism, proclivities toward war, or
anything in that realm of social consciousness. We have strayed from that ideal
lately, thanks in large part to straight-to-video cheapies trying to turn a
quick buck on an easy premise – coming to mind immediately are Zombie Strippers!, Zombies vs. Strippers, and virtually any title that comingles the
promise of nudity with the promise of flesh eating.

The Return of the
Living Dead movies, parts one and two anyway, were fun horror parodies of
George A. Romero’s classic Dead
films. They never forgot the horror aspects and featured a ready-made punk
attitude that fit the early 1980s like a glove. I liken the evolution of Return of the Living Dead III from its
predecessors to the way one might compare grunge to its heavy metal and hair
metal forefathers: The fun is replaced by full-bodied nihilism, and the attacks
on who we were and who we are now come fast and furiously.

Director Brian Yuzna and writer John Penney did not leave a
big footprint on the film world, and stars Melinda Clarke and J. Trevor Edmond
are probably more recognizable from their television work. But, for one film,
they proved masters of macabre social commentary in ways the genre has been
sorely lacking since.

Clarke and Edmond play lovers Julie and Curt. Curt’s dad,
Col. Reynolds, is part of a U.S. military project testing a serum that will
reanimate the dead with the goal of providing cheap, disposable meat for the
American war machine. Already, we are into some pretty heady stuff, and the
plot has not yet begun. As Col. Reynolds and his group continue their
experiments on the undead, Julie dies in a motorcycle accident with Curt at the
helm. Using his father’s serum, Curt brings Julie back to life, whereupon she
becomes a self-hating flesh eater.

That is a lot to chew on, and this movie is often wrongly
dismissed as the big-budget, needlessly weird cousin to the first two films in
the series. So let us break this down slowly and try to see where its greatness
lies and from where its critics are coming.

We will start with Clarke’s Julie, who has become something
of a cult icon, and it is not hard to see why. While the first two installments
have the punk walk and talk down, they lack the feelings of self-loathing,
self-doubt, and nihilism behind the familiar pop culture tropes. This film
brings all of that back in spades within Julie.

Julie does not want to hurt anybody, but as a zombie, it is
in her nature. In an effort to avoid acting out and harming those around her,
she resorts to self-harm. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar and not in a
fantasy, sci-fi way. She hurts herself to fight the urge to hurt others. She
hates who she has become but cannot fight it.

If this reminds you of a teenager you know – or, hell, even
an adult – this is not by accident. The pain is a release, as it is for so many
people like this. I know because I have walked up to that edge and stared into
that abyss. There is nothing there but darkness, and no matter what beauty lay
behind or in front, it is impossible to stop staring down into the pit, so you
dive in.

This film is commendable for having the courage to go there,
and when it does, it just keeps going. Yuzna and Penney venture all the way to
the darkest period of our shared history, which you may recognize in the
abstract but will be struck by if you choose to see it.

The zombies are in this place because the military has
brought them here. The army performs experiments on them that force you to
question what humanity is capable of when it classifies another group as less
than human. It is nothing less than torture for the sake of seeing how far
torture can go. The unsuccessful experiments, along with incalculable others,
go to the furnace – the crematorium if you will.

Maybe it will seem like a stretch to compare the third film
in a zombie horror series to the Holocaust, but if you can watch the army
experiments, the prisons, and the abuse of a misunderstood and vilified minority
without thinking of Josef Mengele, Adolf Hitler, and the one of the greatest
atrocities of our time, you are not watching closely enough.

Perhaps you do see it, and it offends you. You may think
films have no right to trade on the murder of millions of innocents. Well, wake
up. We live in a culture in which violent crimes and serial murders are no
longer shocking. They are primetime television, fictional and not. We filter
everything through sound bites, pop psychology, and end-of-the-world drum
beating. Return of the Living Dead III
is a violent, angry critique of humanity’s past crimes and a warning for what
the future could become. Unfortunately, it is a future we were unable to avoid.

Tomorrow, we try to
recover with one of my favorite films of all time from any genre.